Discussions of Sunbury often make high-flying claims about
its
significance to youth culture and the emerging counter-culture of
the
early 1970s, but the Nimbin Aquarius Festival of 1973 undoubtedly
had a bigger and more lasting impact than any of
the commercial rock festivals of the period, even though it
was relatively small compared to Sunbury. This is because Aquarius
was a
broadly-based conceptual event, held to explore and celebrate
alternative lifestyles, and because it mixed music with other arts and
crafts, rather than simply presenting an extended concert
festival where patrons sat around drinking beer, smoking dope and
watching bands. The decision to
hold the Aquarius festival in the northern NSW village of Nimbin
has also
had a major effect on the subsequent history of that region.

Nimbin is located in the beautiful and lush temperate
rainforest region of north-eastern New South Wales, 30km south of
Lismore. The beautiful Nightcap Range, immediately north of the village, is a
World Heritage-listed National Park. Nimbin was first settled in 1882, but the rainforests in
the area had been extensively exploited for timber from the 1840s
onwards. The cleared land was later turned into pasture and dairying
was the area's main industry until Norco, the regional diary processing
cooperative, closed its butter factory in 1950. This combined with the
loss of primary produce exports after Britain joined the EEC in the
Sixties and the reduction of tariffs in the Seventies, which devastated
Australia's primary sector. from the Fifties to the Seventies about 300
local dairy farms closed and the local population dwindled.

Today, around 10,000 live in the area, but by the early
'70s Nimbin itself was virtually a ghost town.
The revitalisation of the area began with the arrival in late 1972
of a group of student union organisers who were
looking for a site for a major counter-cultural lifestyle festival.
Apart from its idyllic location, a major attraction of Nimbin for the
festival's main organisers, Graeme Dunstan, Johnny Allen and Benny Zable,
was the fact that they would be able to "recycle" the many vacant
buildings in and around the town. Many of the local buildings were
decorated with murals; several of these were painted by renowned
visionary artist
Vernon Treweeke, who was the subject of
a 'comeback' exhibition at Penrith Regional Gallery in 2003,
held in conjunction
with an exhibition of photographs by noted Melbourne photographer David Porter
(aka "Jaques L'Affrique").

Several of the people behind Aquaruis '73 had been involved in and inspired by the Aquarius Festival of University Arts, organised by the Australian Union of Students and held at ANU in Canberra in 1971. Aquarius co-director Graeme Dunstan was an alumnus of
Duntroon Military College and a graduate of the University of NSW.
Graeme became the President of the UNSW Labor Club in 1966 and was
active in organising the beginnings of the anti Vietnam war and
anti-conscription movement on that campus. He organised the LBJ Welcome
Committee which stopped US President Lyndon B. Johnson's motorcade in
Liverpool Street, Sydney -- Graeme was actually one of those under
LBJ's car when
Premier Askin gave his infamous order to "run over the
bastards". In 1967 Graeme was elected President of the UNSW
Student's Union and co-editor of Tharunka
with Mark Lyons. In 1970 he was Director of Student Publications for
the UNSW Students Union when Wendy Bacon and her Tharunka co-editors
used the magazine to challenge the censorship laws. In 1971 Dunstan
again became co-editor of Tharunka with Rob Andrews
and Michael Lucetti.

In May 1973 students, artists, musicians and other young
people from all over Australia gathered in Nimbin for the Festival, which
ran for ten days from 12 May to 23 May. During this time, festival-goers (estimates
range from 5,000 to 10,000) took part in workshops and discussions,
swam and walked around in the nude, smoked dope, listened to music, and
talked about new social experiments. Most were students from the major
campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne.

Available information on the music presented at the festival is
sketchy, but among the musicians known to have been involved in the
Festival were:

At the end of the festival, a meeting was held to
discuss an on-going commitment to the spirit of the festival. This
resulted in the "May Manifesto" which contained many of the ideals and
principles still espoused by the Nimbin community. It spoke of a
"concentration of arts and artists", "survival on earth", "self
sufficiency" on a "tribal basis", "living in harmony with the natural
environment ", "participation rather than consumer entertainment", "no
pre-arranged program of events" and "re-discovering the meaning that
agricultural fairs once had for country people".

The Festival and the May Manifesto eventually led to the
formation of the well-known Tuntable Falls Community, still the largest
commune in the area. As well as those who stayed on after the festival,
others attracted to an alternative lifestyle eventually moved to the
area, either buying land, joining existing communes or forming new
ones. Other communes and cooperatives subsequently formed in the
immediate vicinity of Nimbin or in adjacent valleys -- Billen Cliffs,
Moondani, Blue Springs, Bodhi Farm, and Siddha Farm -- and from the
mid-Seventies onwards, Nimbin became increasingly identified as a
centre for the counterculture and the environmental and sustainable
lifestyle movements in Australia.

For better or worse, recreational drugs became a focus of
public attention. In the years after the
Festival, Nimbin became a haven
for those seeking to establish alternative lifestyles or simply wanting
to "drop out"; they brought marijuana and LSD into the area, and
many of those who settled there began growing dope, which thrived in
the hot, humid north coast climate. The presence of seasonal native
hallucinogenic
mushrooms in the fields and forests of the north coast was an added
attraction, and the use of these drugs became an integral part of the
Nimbin
community experience.

The area became famous for the ready availability of
dope, thanks to the residents' easy-going attitude to its cultivation
and use. It was sold and used openly on the streets of the town, and
visiting buyers often did not even leaving their cars when 'scoring'. The
Aquarian renewal of the village, its gentle pace, and the lush beauty
of the Nimbin area made it a tourist attraction, but the presence of
abundant dope and regular passing trade also acted as a magnet
to others with little or no interest in the social concerns of the
Aquarius veterans.

From the late Seventies onwards Nimbin's social problems
increased as curious tourists, transients and drug dealers flocked to
the area. In the late '70s heroin began to appear in large quantities
in throughout NSW for the first time, and by the early '80s it had
largely replaced marijuana as the main street drug. As a result, drug-related crime and violence became a growing problem. This
change was largely driven by alliances forged between
organised crime (e.g the so-called "Grriffith Mafia') and corrupt
elements of the NSW Police. Acting in
league with
major drug syndicates, detectives and uniformed police acted
concertedly to restrict the cannabis supply by busting dope
growers, dealers and smokers, while covertly promoting heroin use
and dependency by
protecting
importers and dealers and actively participating in importation and
dealing.

In 2000, several Nimbin cafes and businesses began selling fixed-price
marijuana as part of a community attempt to reduce the dealing problem.
Street dealing noticeably subsided but the move predictably angered dealers and
bricks were hurled through the windows of the Rainbow Cafe, the Hemp
Embassy, a gift-shop and campaign centre for legalisation activists.
Police eventually closed the experiment down with a highly publicised
raids and arrests.

Since 1993 Nimbin has been the venue for the "MardiGrass", an annual
protest/festival held in early May. The event originated with a protest
staged in 1993 in the wake of a major undercover police blitz on the
area -- police surperivisng the protest were pelted with eggs, tomatoes and toilet paper and not
surprisingly the demonstration attracted wide publicity. Motivated by
the injustice and negative consequences for the Nimbin community of
cannabis being illegal, Bob Hopkins called for an organised and
peaceful May Day Cannabis Law Reform Rally to march up the main street of Nimbin. He dubbed the event
MardiGrass, linking it to the civil rights agenda behind the
annual Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney.

The original event drew 1000 people, and has been held every year
since then, attracting ever larger crowds and expanding into a cultural
event that echoes the original Aquarius Festival. While much of the
mainstream media coverage predictably focusses on arrests and
scattered incidents of street violence, the MardiGrass has grown
steadily each year and become an established part of the local
calendar. Lismore Council has tacitly recognised it by approving
the MardiGrass Development Application (even though they refrain
from mentioning it in their tourist information) and in 2008
Lismore police Area Command praised the efforts of organisers, although
this was not reported in the mainstream media.